Media Throws Softballs at Tiger Woods Press Conference

Today we met even more surprising Tiger Woods bedfellows, namely every member of the press who asked the golfer a question at this afternoon’s children’s birthday party of a press conference. “What a great day, today,” chirped a calm Woods—and it was! He (probably quite honestly!) told a reporter that he wasn’t at all nervous during the press conference, and even seemed a bit delighted to field questions such as “What was the most difficult thing to deal with?”, “How’s your knee?”, and “Do you understand why your sponsors dropped you?” (For the record, the answers were “Having to look at myself in a light I never wanted to look at myself,” “Great,” and “Of course,” respectively.)

As for the few questions that were of a hard-hitting—and therefore interesting—nature, Woods responded by issuing glib non sequiturs. “Elin is not coming this week, no,” he told one reporter, who then followed up by asking if that was a sign she was not supportive of his return to the game. “I’m excited to play this week,” he answered flatly. When asked about what effect he thinks the scandal will have on his legacy, he responded with nothing more than a thoughtless statement about how learning to help himself, is, if you really think about it, something that actually allows him to help others. The single other provocative and critical line of questioning focused on Woods’s drug use and his association with Dr. Anthony Galea, a physician who is suspected of providing professional athletes with human growth hormones. Woods denied using performance enhancing drugs—he’s “never taken any illegal drug, ever”—and said that Galea treated him for knee injuries last year. Woods also explained that he was taking Ambien and Vicodin due to a combination of pain from knee surgery and stress caused by the death of his father in May 2006.

Mostly, though, Woods used every question as an opportunity to apologize, not that that’s exactly inappropriate, given, well, everything. His fellow golfers, at least, seem to have forgiven him! “It’s amazing how many hugs I’ve gotten from the guys,” he said. This would be sweet except, of course, an abundance of physical affection was the problem to begin with.